Social Media Tools - HootSuite!
How To Use It To Power Boost Traffic!

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What social media tools can you, as a small business owner, use to leverage your time and increase traffic to your website?

In this article I will show you exactly how to use a great social media tool called HootSuite. This will save you a whole heap of time and send traffic to your website sky-rocketing. You may have already read my article Social Media Marketing. How To Win Your Market On 15 Minutes Per Day where I profiled a tool called Twitterfeed. This article takes the same idea but ramps it up to a whole new level. Let me explain!

HootSuite has taken to the online community by storm. The scheduling feature within this tool is really the most powerful way I have come across to schedule posts to your community whether it be a week or even months ahead. You can connect to your community via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Ping.fm, Wordpress, MySpace, mixi and even Google Plus or all of them at the same time. It also allows you to run reports so you can see what posts preformed the best, set up your favorite RSS or Atom feeds and feed them directly to your community and so much more. Although I'm getting a little a head of myself, I will only be focusing on the scheduling feature in this article. As well as giving you handy pointers along the way.

Ok, ready! Lets dive right in.

How To Create A Free HootSuite Account

1) Go to HootSuite.com.

You will first need to create a free account, enter your Email Address, Name and Password then click the Sign Up Now button.

How To Add A Social Network Profile To Your HootSuite Account

2) You will then come to the Welcome tab.

From within this tab you begin by adding one or more social networking profiles. For the sake of this article we will add a Twitter profile.

3) Click on the Add a Twitter profile button - The following box appears.

4 ) Click on the Connect with Twitter button - The following window appears.

• Enter the Username or email and Password that you would normally use to log into your Twitter account with.
• Then click the Authorize app button.

The following Twitter Pages Tab appears with 4 "Streams" of data that display by default.

How To Schedule Posts In HootSuite

Now that you have set up your first Social Media Network in Twitter, I would like to show you how to really save yourself a whole heap of time when making posts. If you are anything like the majority of small businesses, your time is best spent doing what you do best and not necessarily in front of a computer.

Yes you will hear purists say the click through rate on non automated posts are higher. However as in my case I still enjoy a click through rate of between 1.5 and 2.5 even up to 5 percent on some posts which I am really happy with. I do know however that it is not unheard of get a Click Through Rate of up to 10 percent. If you want more information on getting the most from your click throughs check out this great post by Linda Bustos from GetElastic.com. I think if you can get a click through rate of more than 1 percent for any form of promotion you are doing well.

As already mentioned HootSuite enables you to schedule posts weeks even months in advance which I love because it give me time to focus on building more content among other things without being distracted.

To schedule a post in HootSuite:

1) Click on the Publisher menu bar located at the left hand side of the page indicated by a paper plane icon. - The follow screen appears

2) From the Select a profile drop down list at the top and middle of the screen that appears, you will be able to select a social media network that you have already added to your HootSuite account. For the sake of this article select your twitter account.

3) Click in the Compose message field and the following drop down displays.

• Type your post.
• Enter the full url of the page you wish to link to the click the shrink button.
• Select the desired month and day you wish to send the post.
• Select the time as well as the AM or PM button.
• Click the Schedule button.

You will now see the post cued ready for posting.

How To Use RSS In HootSuite To Build Followers

To anyone that is new to RSS or ATOM I suggested you read my web page on RSS Explained first.

Supplying your community with free and valuable content is key to building a following on any social network. But it does not all have to be yours. Using RSS to syndicate or publish another persons content to your community is a win, win, win situation, because it is good for the originator of the content as it promotes them, it is good for you because it can build your following and it is good for your readers or community as well because your delivering free, valuable and in demand information to them.

As an example if you visit my twitter page you will see that I have made several thousand tweets since I started my twitter account in 2010. Most of these tweets have been feed to my community via other peoples RSS feeds. It provides my community with a good mix from experts on the topic of internet marketing.

RSS is good for another reason too. If you can supply the right mix of content to your readers it saves them searching all over the internet for it themselves, and therefore there is more of a chance that they stay on your social network or website.

To set up RSS on your social media network on HootSuite:

1) Click on the Settings menu bar located at the left hand side of the page indicated by a cog wheel icon, Then click on RSS/Atom - the following box appears.

HootSuite gives you all the tools you need within one application to help make your social media marketing successful and easy. As you can see I have already set up 2 feeds in my account. In the free version of HootSuite your limited to 2 free RSS feeds. For a nominal amount per month you can upgrade to HootSuite Pro like I have recently and get access to the full suite of tools including unlimited RSS feeds and reporting. Sign up for a Free 30 day trial of HootSuite Pro.

2) Find and copy the RSS feed url of your favorite website or blog as in the screen below:

3) Then click on the Add New Feed button of the previous box - you will then see the following box appear.

• Paste in Feed URL and Select your Social Network Profile.
• You can, if you wish, change the default settings for Check this feed for new posts every and When new posts are found, send up to drop down lists.
• Then apart from un-checking the include text option I leave everything else as is.
• Click Save Feed and your done.
  

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